If a wise man should ask, What are the modern
virtues? and should answer his own question by a summary of the
things we admire; if he should discard as irrelevant the ideals which
by tradition we profess, but which are not found outside of the
tradition or the profession—ideals like meekness, humility, the
renunciation of this world; if he should include only those
excellences to which our hearts are daily given, and by which our
conduct is motived,—in such an inventory what virtues would he
name?

This question is neither original nor very new.
Our times await the reckoning up of our spiritual goods which is here
suggested. We have at least this wisdom, that many of us are curious
to know just what our virtues are. I wish I could offer myself as the
wise man who brings the answer. But I raise this question merely to
ask another—When the wise man brings his list of our genuine
admirations, will intelligence be one of them? We might seem to be
well within the old ideal of modesty if we claimed the virtue of
intelligence. But before we claim the virtue, are we convinced that
it is a virtue, not a peril?

II

The disposition to consider intelligence a peril is an old
Anglo-Saxon inheritance. Our ancestors have celebrated this
disposition in verse and prose. Splendid as our literature is, it has
not voiced all the aspirations of humanity, nor could it be expected
to voice an aspiration that has not characteristically belonged to
the English race; the praise of intelligence is not one of its
characteristic glories.

“Be good, sweet maid, and let who will he
clever.”

Here is the startling alternative which to the
English, alone among great nations, has been not startling but a
matter of course. Here is the casual assumption that a choice must be
made between goodness and intelligence; that stupidity is first
cousin to moral conduct, and cleverness the first step into mischief;
that reason and God are not on good terms with each other; that the
mind and the heart are rival buckets in the well of truth, inexorably
balanced—full mind, starved heart—stout heart, weak
head.

Kingsley's line is a convenient text, but to
establish the point that English literature voices a traditional
distrust of the mind we must go to the masters. In Shakspere's plays
there are some highly intelligent men, but they are either villains
or tragic victims. To be as intelligent as Richard or Iago or Edmund
seems to involve some break with goodness; to be as wise as Prospero
seems to imply some Faust-like traffic with the forbidden world; to
be as thoughtful as Hamlet seems to be too thoughtful to live. In
Shakspere the prizes of life go to such men as Bassanio, or Duke
Orsino, or Florizel—men of good conduct and sound character,
but of no particular intelligence. There might, indeed, appear to be
one general exception to this sweeping statement: Shakspere does
concede intelligence as a fortunate possession to some of his
heroines. But upon even a slight examination those ladies, like
Portia, turn out to have been among Shakspere's Italian
importations—their wit was part and parcel of the story he
borrowed; or, like Viola, they are English types of humility,
patience, and loyalty, such as we find in the old ballads, with a bit
of Euphuism added, a foreign cleverness of speech. After all, these
are only a few of Shakspere's heroines; over against them are
Ophelia, Juliet, Desdemona, Hero, Cordelia, Miranda,
Perdita—lovable for other qualities than intellect,—and
in a sinister group, Lady Macbeth, Cleopatra, Goneril, intelligent
and wicked.

In Paradise Lost Milton attributes
intelligence of the highest order to the devil. That this is an
Anglo-Saxon reading of the infernal character may be shown by a
reference to the book of Job, where Satan is simply a troublesome
body, and the great wisdom of the story is from the voice of God in
the whirlwind. But Milton makes his Satan so thoughtful, so
persistent and liberty-loving, so magnanimous, and God so illogical,
so heartless and repressive, that many perfectly moral readers fear
lest Milton, like the modern novelists, may have known good and evil,
but could not tell them apart. It is disconcerting to intelligence
that it should be God's angel who cautions Adam not to wander in the
earth, nor inquire concerning heaven's causes and ends, and that it
should be Satan meanwhile who questions and explores. By Milton's
reckoning of intelligence the theologian and the scientist to-day
alike take after Satan.

If there were time, we might trace this valuation
of intelligence through the English novel. We should see how often
the writers have distinguished between intelligence and goodness, and
have enlisted our affections for a kind of inexpert virtue. In
Fielding or Scott, Thackeray or Dickens, the hero of the English
novel is a well-meaning blunderer who in the last chapter is
temporarily rescued by the grace of God from the mess he has made of
his life. Unless he also dies in the last chapter, he will probably
need rescue again. The dear woman whom the hero marries is, with a
few notable exceptions, rather less intelligent than himself. When
David Copperfield marries Agnes, his prospects of happiness, to the
eyes of intelligence, look not very exhilarating. Agnes has more
sense than Dora, but it is not even for
that slight distinction that we must admire her; her great qualities
are of the heart—patience, humility, faithfulness. These are
the qualities also of Thackeray's good heroines, like Laura or Lady
Castlewood. Beatrice Esmond and Becky Sharp, both highly intelligent,
are of course a bad lot.

No less significant is the kind of emotion the
English novelist invites towards his secondary or lower-class
heroes—toward Mr. Boffin in Our Mutual Friend, for
example, or Harry Foker in Pendennis. These characters amuse
us, and we feel pleasantly superior to them, but we agree with the
novelist that they are wholly admirable in their station. Yet if a
Frenchman—let us say Balzac—were presenting such types,
he would make us feel, as in Père Goriot or Eugénie
Grandet, not only admiration for the stable, loyal nature, but
also deep pity that such goodness should be so tragically bound in
unintelligence or vulgarity. This comparison of racial temperaments
helps us to understand ourselves. We may continue the method at our
leisure. What would Socrates have thought of Mr. Pickwick, or the
Vicar of Wakefield, or David Copperfield, or Arthur Pendennis? For
that matter, would he have felt admiration or pity for Colonel
Newcome?

III

I hardly need confess that this is not an adequate account of
English literature. Let me hasten to say that I know the reader is
resenting this somewhat cavalier handling of the noble writers he
loves. He probably is wondering how I can expect to increase his love
of literature by such unsympathetic remarks. But just now I am not
concerned about our love of literature; I take it for granted, and
use it as an instrument to prod us with. If we love Shakspere and
Milton and Scott and Dickens and Thackeray, and yet do not know what
qualities their books hold out for our admiration, then—let me
say it as delicately as possible—our admiration is not
discriminating; and if we neither have discrimination nor are
disturbed by our lack of it, then perhaps that wise man could not
list intelligence among our virtues. Certainly it would be but a
silly account of English literature to say only that it set little
store by the things of the mind. I am aware that for the sake of my
argument I have exaggerated, by insisting upon only one aspect of
English literature. But our history betrays a peculiar warfare
between character and intellect, such as to the Greek, for example,
would have been incomprehensible. The great Englishman, like the most
famous Greeks, had intelligence as well as character, and was at ease
with them both. But whereas the notable Greek seems typical of his
race, the notable Englishman usually seems an exception to his own
people, and is often best appreciated in other lands. What is more
singular—in spite of the happy combination in himself of
character and intelligence, he often fails to recognize the value of
that combination in his neighbors. When Shakspere portrayed such
amateurish statesmen as the Duke in Measure for Measure,
Burleigh was guiding Elizabeth's empire, and Francis Bacon was
soon to be King James's counsellor. It was the young Milton who
pictured the life of reason in L'Allegro and Il
Penseroso, the most spiritual fruit of philosophy in
Comus; and when he wrote his epic he was probably England's
most notable example of that intellectual inquiry and independence
which in his great poem he discouraged. There remain several
well-known figures in our literary history who have both possessed
and believed in intelligence—Byron and Shelley in what seems
our own day, Edmund Spenser before Shakspere's time. England has more
or less neglected all three, but they must in fairness be counted to
her credit. Some excuse might be offered for the neglect of Byron and
Shelley by a nation that likes the proprieties; but the gentle
Spenser, the noblest philosopher and most chivalrous gentleman in our
literature, seems to be unread only because he demands a mind as well
as a heart used to high things.

This will be sufficient qualification of any
disparagement of English literature; no people and no literature can
be great that are not intelligent, and England has produced not only
statesmen and scientists of the first order, but also poets in whom
the soul was fitly mated with a lofty intellect. But I am asking you
to reconsider your reading in history and fiction, to reflect whether
our race has usually thought highly of the intelligence by which it
has been great; I suggest these non-intellectual aspects of our
literature as commentary upon my question—and all this with the
hope of pressing upon you the question as to what you think of
intelligence.

Those of us who frankly prefer character to
intelligence are therefore not without precedent. If we look beneath
the history of the English people, beneath the ideas expressed in our
literature, we find in the temper of our remotest ancestors a certain
bias which still prescribes our ethics and still prejudices us
against the mind. The beginnings of our conscience can be
geographically located. It began in the German forests, and it gave
its allegiance not to the intellect but to the will. Whether or not
the severity of life in a hard climate raised the value of that
persistence by which alone life could be preserved, the Germans as
Tacitus knew them, and the Saxons as they landed in England, held as
their chief virtue that will-power which makes character. For craft
or strategy they had no use; they were already a bulldog race; they
liked fighting, and they liked best to settle the matter hand to
hand. The admiration for brute force which naturally accompanied this
ideal of self-reliance, drew with it as naturally a certain moral
sanction. A man was as good as his word, and he was ready to back up
his word with a blow. No German, Tacitus says, would enter into a
treaty of public or private business without his sword in his hand.
When this emphasis upon the will became a social emphasis, it gave
the direction to ethical feeling. Honor lay in a man's integrity, in
his willingness and ability to keep his word; therefore the man
became more important than his word or deed. Words and deeds were
then easily interpreted, not in terms of absolute good and evil, but
in terms of the man behind them. The deeds of a bad man were bad; the
deeds of a good man were good. Fielding wrote Tom Jones to
show that a good man sometimes does a bad action, consciously or
unconsciously, and a bad man sometimes does good, intentionally or
unintentionally. From the fact that Tom Jones is still
popularly supposed to be as wicked as it is coarse, we may judge that
Fielding did not convert all his readers. Some progress certainly has
been made; we do not insist that the more saintly of two surgeons
shall operate on us for appendicitis. But as a race we seem as far as
possible from realising that an action can intelligently be called
good only if it contributes to a good end; that it is the moral
obligation of an intelligent creature to find out as far as possible
whether a given action leads to a good or a bad end; and that any
system of ethics that excuses him from that obligation is vicious. If
I give you poison, meaning to give you wholesome food, I
have—to say the least—not done a good act; and unless I
intend to throw overboard all pretence to intelligence, I must feel
some responsibility for that trifling neglect to find out whether
what I gave you was food or poison.

Obvious as the matter is in this academic
illustration, it ought to have been still more obvious in Matthew
Arnold's famous plea for culture. The purpose of culture, he said, is
"to make reason and the will of God prevail." This formula he quoted
from an Englishman. Differently stated, the purpose of culture, he
said, is "to make an intelligent being yet more intelligent." This
formula he borrowed from a Frenchman. The basis culture must have in
character, the English resolution to make reason and the will of God
prevail, Arnold took for granted; no man ever set a higher price on
character—so far as character by itself will go. But he spent
his life trying to sow a little suspicion that before we can make the
will of God prevail we must find out what is the will of God.

I doubt if Arnold taught us much. He merely
embarrassed us temporarily. Our race has often been so embarrassed
when it has turned a sudden corner and come upon intelligence.
Charles Kingsley himself, who would rather be good than
clever,—and had his wish,—was temporarily embarrassed
when in the consciousness of his own upright character he publicly
called Newman a liar. Newman happened to be intelligent as well as
good, and Kingsley's discomfiture is well known. But we discovered
long ago how to evade the sudden embarrassments of intelligence.
"Toll for the brave," sings the poet for those who went down in the
Royal George. They were brave. But he might have sung, "Toll
for the stupid." In order to clean the hull, brave Kempenfelt and his
eight hundred heroes took the serious risk of laying the vessel well
over on its side, while most of the crew were below. Having made the
error, they all died bravely; and our memory passes easily over the
lack of a virtue we never did think much of, and dwells on the
English virtues of courage and discipline. So we forget the shocking
blunder of the charge of the Light Brigade, and proudly sing the
heroism of the victims. Lest we flatter ourselves that this trick of
defence has departed with our fathers—this reading of
stupidity in terms of the tragic courage that endures its
results—let us reflect that recently, after full warning, we
drove a ship at top speed through a field of icebergs. When we were
thrilled to read how superbly those hundreds died, in the great
English way, a man pointed out that they did indeed die in the
English way, and that our pride was therefore ill-timed; that all
that bravery was wasted; that the tragedy was in the shipwreck of
intelligence. That discouraging person was an Irishman.

I have spoken of our social inheritance as though
it were entirely English. Once more let me qualify my terms. Even
those ancestors of ours who never left Great Britain were heirs of
many civilizations—Roman, French, Italian, Greek. With each
world-tide some love of pure intelligence was washed up on English
shores, and enriched the soil, and here and there the old stock
marvelled at its own progeny. But to America, much as we may
sentimentally deplore it, England seems destined to be less and less
the source of culture, of religion and learning. Our land assimilates
all races; with every ship in the harbor our old English ways of
thought must crowd a little closer to make room for a new tradition.
If some of us do not greatly err, these newcomers are chiefly driving
to the wall our inherited criticism of the intellect. As surely as
the severe northern climate taught our forefathers the value of the
will, the social conditions from which these new citizens have
escaped have taught them the power of the mind. They differ from each
other, but against the Anglo-Saxon they are confederated in a Greek
love of knowledge, in a Greek assurance that sin and misery are the
fruit of ignorance, and that to know is to achieve virtue. They join
forces at once with that earlier arrival from Greece, the scientific
spirit, which like all the immigrants has done our hard work and put
up with our contempt. Between this rising host that follow
intelligence, and the old camp that put their trust in a stout
heart, a firm will, and a strong hand, the fight is on. Our college
men will be in the thick of it. If they do not take sides, they will
at least be battered in the scuffle. At this moment they are readily
divided into those who wish to be men—whatever that
means—and those who wish to be intelligent men, and those who,
unconscious of blasphemy or humor, prefer not to be intelligent, but
to do the will of God.

When we consider the nature of the problems to be
solved in our day, it seems—to many of us, at least—that
these un-English arrivals are correct, that intelligence is the
virtue we particularly need. Courage and steadfastness we cannot do
without, so long as two men dwell on the earth; but it is time to
discriminate in our praise of these virtues. If you want to get out
of prison, what you need is the key to the lock. If you cannot get
that, have courage and steadfastness. Perhaps the modern world has
got into a kind of prison, and what is needed is the key to the lock.
If none of the old virtues exactly fits, why should it seem ignoble
to admit it? England for centuries has got on better by sheer
character than some other nations by sheer intelligence, but there is
after all a relation between the kind of problem and the means we
should select to solve it. Not all problems are solved by willpower.
When England overthrew Bonaparte, it was not his intelligence she
overthrew; the contest involved other things besides intelligence,
and she wore him out in the matter of physical endurance. The enemy
that comes to her as a visible host or armada she can still close
with and throttle; but when the foe arrives as an arrow that flieth
by night, what avail the old sinews, the old stoutness of heart! We
Americans face the same problems, and are too much inclined to oppose
to them similar obsolete armor. We make a moral issue of an economic
or social question, because it seems ignoble to admit it is simply a
question for intelligence. Like the medicine-man, we use oratory and
invoke our hereditary divinities, when the patient needs only a
little quiet, or permission to get out of bed. We applaud those
leaders who warm to their work—who, when they cannot open a
door, threaten to kick it in. In the philosopher's words, we curse
the obstacles of life as though they were devils. But they are not
devils. They are obstacles.

IV

Perhaps my question as to what you think of intelligence has been
pushed far enough. But I cannot leave the subject without a
confession of faith.

None of the reasons here suggested will quite
explain the true worship of intelligence, whether we worship it as
the scientific spirit, or as scholarship, or as any other reliance
upon the mind. We really seek intelligence not for the answers it may
suggest to the problems of life, but because we believe it is
life,—not for aid in making the will of God prevail, but
because we believe it is the will of God. We love it, as we love
virtue, for its own sake, and we believe it is only virtue's other
and more precise name. We believe that the virtues wait upon
intelligence—literally wait, in the history of the race.
Whatever is elemental in man—love, hunger, fear—has
obeyed from the beginning the discipline of intelligence. We are told
that to kill one's aging parents was once a demonstration of
solicitude; about the same time, men hungered for raw meat and
feared the sun's eclipse. Filial love, hunger, and fear are still
motives to conduct, but intelligence has directed them to other ends.
If we no longer hang the thief or flog the school-boy, it is not that
we think less harshly of theft or laziness, but that intelligence has
found a better persuasion to honesty and enterprise.

We believe that even in religion, in the most
intimate room of the spirit, intelligence long ago proved itself the
master-virtue. Its inward office from the beginning was to decrease
fear and increase opportunity; its outward effect was to rob the
altar of its sacrifice and the priest of his mysteries. Little wonder
that from the beginning the disinterestedness of the accredited
custodians of all temples has been tested by the kind of welcome they
gave to intelligence. How many hecatombs were offered on more shores
than that of Aulis, by seamen waiting for a favorable wind, before
intelligence found out a boat that could tack! The altar was
deserted, the religion revised—fear of the uncontrollable
changing into delight in the knowledge that is power. We contemplate
with satisfaction the law by which in our long history one religion
has driven out another, as one hypothesis supplants another in
astronomy or mathematics. The faith that needs the fewest altars, the
hypothesis that leaves least unexplained, survives; and the
intelligence that changes most fears into opportunity is most
divine.

We believe this beneficent operation of
intelligence was swerving not one degree from its ancient course
when under the name of the scientific spirit it once more laid its
influence upon religion. If the shock here seemed too violent, if the
purpose of intelligence here seemed to be not revision but
contradiction, it was only because religion was invited to digest an
unusually large amount of intelligence all at once. Moreover, it is
not certain that devout people were more shocked by Darwinism than
the pious mariners were by the first boat that could tack. Perhaps
the sacrifices were not abandoned all at once.

But the lover of intelligence must be patient
with those who cannot readily share his passion. Some pangs the mind
will inflict upon the heart. It is a mistake to think that men are
united by elemental affections. Our affections divide us. We strike
roots in immediate time and space, and fall in love with our
locality, the customs and the language in which we were brought up.
Intelligence unites us with mankind, by leading us in sympathy to
other times, other places, other customs; but first the prejudiced
roots of affection must be pulled up. These are the old pangs of
intelligence, which still comes to set a man at variance against his
father, saying, “He that loveth father or mother more than me,
is not worthy of me.”

Yet, if intelligence begins in a pang, it
proceeds to a vision. Through measureless time its office has been to
make of life an opportunity, to make goodness articulate, to make
virtue a fact. In history at least, if not yet in the individual,
Plato's faith has come true, that sin is but ignorance, and knowledge
and virtue are one. But all that intelligence has accomplished
dwindles in comparison with the vision it suggests and warrants.
Beholding this long liberation of the human spirit, we foresee, in
every new light of the mind, one unifying mind, wherein the human
race shall know its destiny and proceed to it with satisfaction, as
an idea moves to its proper conclusion; we conceive of intelligence
at last as the infinite order, wherein man, when he enters it, shall
find himself.

Meanwhile he continues to find his virtues by
successive insights into his needs. Let us cultivate insight.

“O Wisdom of the Most High,
That reachest from the beginning to the end,
And dost order all things in strength and grace,
Teach us now the way of understanding.”

John Erskine (October 5, 1879 - June 2, 1951) was an American
educator and author, pianist and composer. He was an English
professor at Amherst College from 1903 to 1909, followed by Columbia
University from 1909 and 1937. During his tenure at Columbia
University he formulated the General Honors Course—responsible for
inspiring the influential Great Books movement. He published over 100
books, novels, criticism, essays including his most important essay,
The Moral Obligation to Be Intelligent (1915). He was the
first president of the Juilliard School of Music (from 1928 to 1937).
He also remained director of the Metropolitan Opera Association,
which runs the Metropolitan Opera, a noted opera company based in New
York City.
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